Austin Vesely's first feature is 'Slice,' the pizza-murder flick featuring Chance the Rapper

Michelle Kanaar / Chicago Tribune

Director Austin Vesely, who made the new movie, "Slice," is photographed at the Logan Theatre in Chicago. The film, which stars Chance the Rapper, is set to premiere Monday.

Director Austin Vesely, who made the new movie, "Slice," is photographed at the Logan Theatre in Chicago. The film, which stars Chance the Rapper, is set to premiere Monday. (Michelle Kanaar / Chicago Tribune)

Dan HymanChicago Tribune

Austin Vesely knows the path he’s charted in the film world is hardly a traditional one.

At 28, he saw the trailer for his first feature film, “Slice,” become the most-viewed on iTunes, and with his film being released by A24 — arguably the hottest independent film studio of the moment, having released Academy Award-winners “Moonlight” and “Lady Bird” in consecutive years — it’s the type of rocket-shot career trajectory that finds his filmmaker peers telling him: “You know this is a crazy scenario, right? This is madness!”

Sure, Vesely knows it helps that one of his closest friends and collaborators is Chance the Rapper, who after befriending the filmmaker in 2012 and then enlisting him to direct several of his music videos, signed on to star as a disgraced werewolf in the artsy, surreal and darkly comedic horror film, which premieres Monday evening at The Arclight Chicago. But that didn’t make things any less unimaginable when Vesely stepped on set in August 2016 to begin filming, more than two years after Chance posted a poster for “Slice” on his Instagram at a time when the movie was only a spec script.

“I was freaking out all the time,” Vesely recalls of the roughly five weeks spent in Joliet shooting the surreal horror film that plays fast and loose with traditional slasher-film conventions, and whose ironic detachment between life and death, Vesely says, was inspired in part by the George Saunders novella “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.” If the filmmaker was on edge it was due in part to managing a $1.1 million budget, but also because, in addition to the chart-topping rapper-cum-nascent actor, he was tasked with giving direction to a host of seasoned actors including Zazie Beets (“Atlanta,” “Deadpool 2”), Paul Scheer (“Veep”), Joe Keery (“Stranger Things”) and former “Saturday Night Live” cast member Chris Parnell.

Watch the trailer for "Slice," the comedy horror movie starring Chance the Rapper,

Watch the trailer for "Slice," the comedy horror movie starring Chance the Rapper,

“But then again,” Vesely explains on a recent morning, flashing a sly, confident smile as he lays waste to a kale salad at a Logan Square restaurant he often frequents, “you have to keep it calm from the top down.” To that end, while his stomach turned on the inside, the filmmaker projected confidence on the outside. So much so that at shoot’s end, Parnell expressed his admiration at the first-time director’s easygoing demeanor. The director laughed it off and recalls thinking, “Yes! I fooled him!”

A healthy dose of self-deprecation and humility notwithstanding, Vesely is confident in his skill set and has “been working toward this moment for years. “

“Quite legitimately since I was 6 years old I was self-identifying as a director,” says the son of two Army parents — his father is in demilitarization for the Department of the Army, his mother started a career as an Army civilian in 2006. “Which is kind of funny because I didn’t even know what that job meant.”

His parents’ employer had Vesely moving around a great deal as a child: he was born in Northwest Illinois before moving to Germany and Oklahoma before finally settling down as a high school junior in the Quad Cities area. A longtime drummer and heavy metal die-hard while in high school, Vesely assumed music would be his path in life.

“Slice” creative consultant Elijah Alvarado, a longtime friend of Vesely’s, remembers meeting the director around this time in a high school photography class at Pleasant Valley High School in Bettendorf, Iowa. Vesely was quiet, “but he was already light-years beyond what me and any of my friends were doing in film at that point,” Alvarado remembers. “We were making a ridiculous monster movie called ‘The Legend of One-Armed Crab Man’ and he was already making films with political commentary.”

After graduating, Vesely enrolled at University of Iowa, took some film classes there and realized, “This is what I like to do. I need to give it a try or I’ll be denying myself my truth.” So he moved to Chicago, enrolled at Columbia College’s film school and after he and Alvarado began working on some music videos with local artists he eventually connected with Kids These Days, an upstart band that included the rapper Vic Mensa and musician Nico Segal. He joined them on a Canadian tour, and instantly “I felt like I was really part of something,” Vesely recalls. In late 2012, Vesely, with Alvarado's assistance (“I was always building rigs and making DIY lights and just weird stuff,” Alvarado recalls with a laugh) directed the video for the Mensa and Segal song “Clear Eyes," the final scene of which was shot at Alvarado's house. It was there the fledgling director met Chance, convinced the raw-but-talented rapper to let him direct his video for the “10 Day” track “F--- You Tahm Bout,” and their creative partnership was born. (Chance was unavailable for comment).

In short order Vesely became Chance’s go-to music video director, shooting videos for Chance songs including “Juice,” “Everybody’s Something,” and “Sunday Candy.” As the rapper’s fame increased, so did the scale of the productions. For 2016’s “Angels” Vesely shot Chance as he stood atop a CTA train. Best of all for Vesely, not only was there a built-in audience for his work, but he felt the experience was training him for his ambition to make a feature-length narrative.

“I wasn’t necessarily having to tell a long and cohesive story, but I was still running a big set and I was collaborating with departments,” he says. “It was great because I was getting the skills I would eventually need to make larger-scale narrative work, but I was doing it in a comfortable place with my friends.”

Still, Vesely always had ambitions to make a feature film. As far as back as 2013 he started work on the earliest incarnation of what would become “Slice.” It began as scribblings in a notebook, a loose script “just for fun about an idea for a pizza-murder film.” It was originally intended as a short to be shown exclusively at a local horror film festival Alvarado tried to organize. The fest never happened but after Chance read the script, agreed to star in it, posted the poster on social media and A24 reached out to get involved, “Slice” was suddenly a reality.

Now, after nearly two years of postproduction work, the film is set to arrive. When asked how he feels about many referring to “Slice” as the new Chance the Rapper film, the director confesses that at one time this bothered him, “but over time you start to steel your nerves toward it. It was always the same way (with music videos). They don’t credit you. But you just get used to it. What I’m proud of is this film is a pure testament of what I’m trying to do. It’s purely what I intended to make, flaws and all.”

Vesely is already looking ahead — in addition to working on another feature script, he has been busy with a host of other projects including recently directing a TV pilot starring comedian Hannibal Buress, as well as offering creative consultation on the recently-released LeBron James-starring HBO docuseries “The Shop.”

No matter the reception to “Slice,” Vesely says, he won’t hesitate to dive into whatever comes next. “You can learn stuff in film school,” the filmmaker explains, “but just by going and doing it yourself you learn so much more.”